The Last Letter from Your Lover

to say. ‘That PO box has been held by the same person for, ooh, almost forty years. Not that that’s particularly unusual in itself.’
    ‘So what is?’
    ‘The fact that it’s never had a letter. Not one. We’ve contacted the holder lots of times to give her the chance to shut it down. She says she wants to keep it open. We say it’s up to her if she wants to waste her money.’ She peers at the letter. ‘Love letter, is it? Oh, how sad.’
    ‘Can you give me her name?’ Ellie’s stomach tenses. This could be a better story even than she’d envisaged.
    The woman shakes her head. ‘Sorry, I can’t. Data protection and all that.’
    ‘Oh, please!’ She thinks of Melissa’s face if she can come back with a Forbidden Love That Lasted Forty Years. ‘Please. You have no idea how important this is to me.’
    ‘Sorry, I really am, but it’s more than my job’s worth.’
    Ellie swears under her breath and glances behind her at the queue that has suddenly appeared. Margie is turning back to her door.
    ‘Thank you anyway,’ Ellie says, remembering her manners.
    ‘No problem.’ Behind them a small child is crying, trying to escape from the restraints of its pram.
    ‘Hang on.’ Ellie’s rustling in her bag.
    ‘Yes?’
    She grins. ‘Could I – you know – leave a letter in it?’
    Dear Jennifer,
    Please excuse the intrusion, but I have come across some personal correspondence that I believe may be yours, and I’d welcome the opportunity to return it to you.
    I can be contacted on the numbers below.
    Yours sincerely,
    Ellie Haworth
    Rory looks at it. They’re sitting at the pub across from the Nation . It’s dark, even so early in the evening, and under the sodium lights green removal lorries are still visible outside the front gate, men in overalls travelling backwards and forwards up the wide steps to the entrance. They have been an almost permanent fixture for weeks now.
    ‘What? You think I’ve got the tone wrong?’
    ‘No.’ He’s sitting beside her on the banquette, one foot angled against the table leg in front of them.
    ‘What, then? You’re doing that thing with your face.’
    He grins. ‘I don’t know, don’t ask me. I’m not a journalist.’
    ‘Come on. What does the face mean?’
    ‘Well, doesn’t it make you feel a bit . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I don’t know . . . It’s so personal. And you’re going to be asking her to air her dirty linen in public.’
    ‘She might be glad of the chance. She might find him again.’ There’s a note of defiant optimism in her voice.
    ‘Or she might be married, and they’ve spent forty years trying to get over her affair.’
    ‘I doubt it. Anyway, how do you know it’s dirty linen? They might be together now. It might have had a happy ending.’
    ‘And she kept the PO box open for forty years? It didn’t have a happy ending.’ He hands back the letter. ‘She might even be mentally ill.’
    ‘Oh, so holding a torch for someone means you’re mad. Obviously.’
    ‘Keeping a PO box open for forty years, without getting a single letter in it, is on the far side of normal behaviour.’
    He has a point, she concedes. But the idea of Jennifer and her empty PO box has taken hold of her imagination. More importantly, it’s the closest thing she has to a decent feature. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she says. She doesn’t tell him she posted the good copy that afternoon.
    ‘So,’ he says, ‘did you have a good time last night? Not too sore today?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The ice-skating.’
    ‘Oh. A little.’ She straightens her legs, feeling the tightness in her thighs, and redders a little when she brushes his knee with her own. In-jokes have sprung up between them. She is Jayne Torvill; he is the humble librarian, there to do her bidding. He texts her with deliberate misspellings: Pls will the smart ladee com and hav a drink with the humble librarrian later?
    ‘I heard you came down to find me.’
    She glances at him and he’s grinning again. She grimaces. ‘Your boss is so grumpy. Honestly. It was as if I’d asked him to sacrifice his first-born when all I was doing was trying to get a message to you.’
    ‘He’s all right,’ Rory says, wrinkling his nose. ‘He’s just stressed. Really stressed. This is his last project before he retires and he’s got forty thousand documents to move in the right order, plus the ones that are being scanned for digital storage.’
    ‘We’re all busy, Rory.’
    ‘He just wants